Address by COSATU General Secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, at

State University of New York- Stony Brook

08 June, 2002

 

Class and Modern Society: Class Race, and the Struggle for Freedom in South Africa.

Lecture delivered at the 'How Class Works Conference'


1. The Global Context

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles…oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carrying on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight" Marx and Engels in Communist Manifesto.

One of the myths being perpetuated today is that globalisation - a process of economic integration - has transcended the basic laws of capitalist development - including but not limited to notions that class struggle is over! But as I would insist, this neither defines our reality nor provides an adequate analytic framework.

After the collapse of the Soviet Bloc the global balance of power shifted in favour of capital and powerful industrialized countries. In class terms capital is dominant while labour is often on the defensive. The collapse of the Soviet bloc produced a unipolar world dominated by the US and the capitalist system. The dominant role of the industrialized countries and capital is aided by the increasing forced integration of the world economy and imposition of a one-size-fits-all economic trajectory.
While globalisation is not a new phenomenon, the current phase of globalisation is distinct and has been characterised by rapid technological advances in information and communication, which have enabled movement and power of capital. The present global expansion of economic process is being actively and consciously shaped by leading capitalist forces, organized through powerful political and economic institutions. Often this masquerades as national interest according to which developed countries are engaged in efforts to represent the national good. However, if you apply class analysis to this rhetoric then the truth is revealed. In many cases the states are acting in the interest of the powerful class.

For example the US administration rejection of Kyoto Convention is essentially about defending the interests of the energy barons in the US - not the ordinary US citizens. This is a classical example of how the state works. It imposes the hegemony of the dominant class as the national interest. In this example, the interests of the energy barons are now paraded as the national interest. In asserting this we are not indulging in a conspiracy theory. There is no conspiracy - but there is a strategy.

The prospects for the re-emergence of radical struggle depend ultimately on the larger evolution of the world capitalist economy. We therefore need to analyse the laws of motion of capitalism in our time - in ways that neither succumb to the dominant view that changes in the scale and workings of the system have eliminated the possibility of fundamental change, nor deny the existence of new constraints on our action.

2. The Legitimacy Crisis Facing Global Capital

Like all social and economic processes dominated by capitalism, the current phase of imperialist restructuring is highly contradictory in character. It is partly, driven by innovative and progressive technical advances that greatly expand the potential integration and capacity of human societies. But it is also driven by the insatiable pursuit of private profit. It is marked by deepening inequality within countries, between countries, between classes, and by the exploitation and deepening of gender oppression.

The poor, in both developed and developing countries have been the losers from globalisation. There has been a systematic assault on working people over this past quarter of a century. In the richest and most successful economy in the world, the US, the ratio between the wages of blue-collar workers and top management has widened. Even the World Bank in its 2000 World Development Report concedes that poverty amid plenty is the world greatest challenge. The report indicates that of the World 6 billion people, 2.8 billion live on less than $2 a day, 1.2 billion on less than $1 a day.
Growing social inequalities are often the fertile ground in which other negative realities have taken root in the developed capitalist countries, including racism, xenophobia directed against non-nationals, and neo-fascism.


The 1997 world economic crisis represented a crisis moment for global capital and led to the all-round questioning of neo-liberalism - the idea that everything should be left to the self regulating market. This crisis exploded many myths about capitalist globalisation. Globalisation seemed to stand not so much for a new stable world order but for the globalisation of capitalist crises on a world scale not seen since the Great Depression. Each of the major assumptions of globalisation as a process of rationalisation of world capitalism were immediately called into question.

During the world economic crisis, more millions were reduced to poverty many of them has so recently escaped.

Globalisation has not worked for the working class here in the US the richest and the most powerful country but also in every corner of the globe.

Faced with the devastating effects of globalisation the social movement - dormant for a greater part of the 90s -begun to flex its muscle. This was dramatised by the Seattle protest in November 1999. Since then, all major meetings of global capital or their representatives are accompanied by social protest. Seattle has instilled a new ray of hope and confidence within the progressive social movement.

There is a real danger though that this social protest will become a meaningless sideshow if it is not properly harnessed and directed towards building a sustainable world movement.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle is the ideological hegemony exerted by the capitalist order, which attempts to channel such mass revolts into largely meaningless efforts to reform particular institutional arrangements, while the underlying structure of power remains unquestioned.

The working class, the most organized section of the world progressive movement, is faced with the challenge to lead these disparate forces and bring their power to bear on global capital. For this reason, the working class cannot not be satisfied with leading itself but must build broader coalition for radical reforms and revolution.

3. The National Democratic Struggle in South Africa

Understanding the international context and the interconnectedness of our own struggle with socialist, working class, democratic and liberation struggles around the world is part of our overall strategic perspective.

The South African National Democratic Revolution arose as a reaction to the way colonial capitalism distorted South Africa's society and economy. That system combined national (race), gender and class oppression. The National Democratic Revolution (NDR) addresses this heritage by demanding radical moves towards democracy and equity in both the state and the economy.
The liberation movement led by the ANC characterized the white minority rule in our country as a variant of colonialism - as Colonialism of a Special Type (CST). CST describes the path of capitalist accumulation pursued in South Africa, which was forged, with the active backing of British imperialism, around the colonial class forces and the national oppression of the majority.
It was around this colonial alignment of class forces that South Africa was integrated into a wider imperialist system that was, at once, economic, political, military and cultural in character.

The fundamental objective of the NDR is the liberation of black people in general and African people in particular from national domination and creation of unified, non-racial, non-sexist democratic society. As such it requires a radical transformation of society to achieve its aims - this is captured by the African National Congress's (ANC) 1969 Strategy & Tactics Document that states:

"In our country - more than any other part of the oppressed world - it is inconceivable for liberation to have meaning without a return of wealth and the land to the people as a whole. It is therefore a fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy. To allow existing economic forces to retain their interests is to feed the root of racial supremacy and does not represent even the shadow of liberation"

Although the national liberation movement brought together various strata and classes, over time, the working class took over the leadership of the National Democratic Revolution.
The working class forms the organisational base of the liberation movement, as it is the most organized and easy to organize sector of our society.

The working class is regarded as a primary motive force of the National Democratic Revolution not because it is the most downtrodden or exploited but because of its strategic position in the economy, its ability to launch and sustain the revolution and the commitment and its willingness to make supreme sacrifices for the revolution.

In the course of struggle the working class asserted its hegemony by ensuring that its ideas are dominant and that the liberation movement is biased towards addressing its needs. The values and morals of the working class that is politicised are universal, they are centred around unity, solidarity, willingness to sacrifice for the common good, equity and sharing. These values have become the values of the National Democratic Revolution. In simple terms this means that the analytical framework used by the liberation movement is predicated on a working class perspective.

In its policies the liberation movement has to retain this bias towards the working class by making sure that liberation does not only benefit the black elite or by changing the complexion of oppression rather than transform power relations in favour of the working class.

Working class leadership of the democratic movement evolved over time and as such was not an overnight event.

The ANC - formed in 1912 - in its early days was not a mass revolutionary movement but a narrow and conservative nationalist movement led by black intellectuals and some of the chiefs. Its basic demands and methods of struggle were not aimed a radical reconfiguration of South African society - rather it concentrated on winning civil and political rights for the African majority often relying on petitions and sending missions with limited and narrow demands.

The development of the black working class as the mining industry expanded created the objective conditions for the development of a working class movement in South Africa. This took shape with the formation of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) in 1921 and the labour movement. However this was largely a white working class movement, which at times reflected its narrow race interests. Over time the Communist Party increasingly drew Africans and African workers into its ranks.

The formation of black trade unions beginning with the ICU planted the seeds for a black working class trade union movement. Many ANC and CPSA stalwarts played a crucial role in the development of the African trade unions.

The growing trade union and working class movement and the radicalisation of the ANC in the late 1940's and beginning of the 1950's ushered a new phase in the liberation movement.

The SACP a political party of the working class, played a critical role in influencing ANC perspective so that by the 1950s the ANC adopted a consistently revolutionary and working class biased positions.

This crystallized in the Freedom Charter in 1955, which contained a number of working class demands - and in the ANC's strategy and tactics in 1969, which analysed the nature of oppression from a class perspective.

As such the perspective of the movement shifted from a narrow nationalist vision to a broader vision that understood the interconnectedness of race, class and gender oppression. That perspective underlined the fact that the struggle was not about changing the complexion of oppression but to fundamentally change power relations.

Indeed, the working class was the bedrock of the liberation movement. Workers led struggles in South Africa's workplaces for better working conditions and challenged apartheid on the shop floor. Workers also understood that the struggle in the workplace was linked to the broader struggle for political democracy and economic justice. In the residential areas and other spheres of life, the working class sacrificing their leisure time led struggles for better education, health care, exorbitant rental and illegitimate local authorities etc. It was working class youth that confronted the police in many South African townships. Workers were on forefront of community struggles. This take time to implant, it takes a real effort to politicise workers to understand that they are a proletariat and have peculiar interests that are in conflict with the interests of capital.

It is not automatic that workers understand that they are a leading detachment of the working class.

Given the nature of oppression in South Africa the working class had to form broader alliance with the rest of the oppressed people and other progressive forces. In South Africa, the history of oppression on the basis of race and gender created the conditions for a broad alliance of all oppressed people. In this alliance the working class played a central role. But apartheid created almost equal deprivation of wealth and rights across the classes within the black community providing the grounds for broader and maximum unity. As such the South Africa democratic revolution was a multiclass struggle under the leadership of the working class.

4. Class Struggle in Contemporary South Africa

With the achievement of political democracy, the unity of the majority that led to national liberation faces new challenges. On the one hand, some sections of the oppressed are able to join the capitalist class, both by using positions in the state and by co-option directly into big business. Yet the growth of the black bourgeoisies is not in contradiction with the goals of the NDR as the NDR also sought to address discrimination and denial of opportunities of black people to own businesses and to trade. So this tension and seemingly contradiction underline differences in long-term economic and social interests of all the components of the NDR.

To understand the changes since 1994 requires an analysis of shifts in class formation. There has been no basic change in the nature of the dominant fraction of capital, which remains centred in mining and the financial sector.

But new classes have emerged among those oppressed under apartheid. Above all, a few have managed to progress rapidly in business and the state machinery, in some sectors achieving considerable economic power and political influence.

For the majority, in contrast, the period after 1994 brought a range of freedoms and some social services, but changed little in their economic position. The job loss bloodbath, particularly for low paid workers undermined many of the gains won by labour.

South Africa is a highly unequal society by any measure of inequality. The gross inequalities in our society correspond largely to (but not exclusive) race. However, inequality among the African population is also on the rise. Measured by Gini-coefficient, inequality in South Africa is ranked as the fifth highest in the world.

As a result of developments in class structure, the position of the working class in the national democratic revolution has come under attack. The attack on the working class centers on the demand that the state support black business in both the private and public sector, and drop measures to transform power relations in favour of the working class.

The most serious long-term strategic threat to the NDR is the attempt by capital to engage and transform our own liberation movement with a view to establishing a new "deracialised" capitalist ruling bloc. Central to this strategic project is the attempt to redefine the NDR as a struggle:

In general this describes the class dynamics of South African struggle in a post apartheid society. The following section provides a broad glimpse into the achievement and challenges of post apartheid South African society.

5. Overview of Post-Apartheid Society

It is now eight years since the triumph of the democratic forces over the evil apartheid system. The decisive victory of the democratic movement in the general elections of 1994 and 1999 gave the progressive forces access to elements of state power and tilted the balance of power in favour of the revolutionary forces.

South Africa's dual transition - from political oppression and economic exploitation - went through phases of movement forward and setbacks.

In many ways South Africa remains a society in transition - the state has not congealed to represent a particular class interests. For this reason, the contest is essentially about where the pendulum should finally rest. The battle is about which of the contenting class force's interests will be declared the 'national interest'.

The democratic forces seek to build a national democratic society underpinned by a mixed economy in which the state plays a leading role. Capital on the other hand seeks a deracialised capitalism underpinned by a low-intensity democracy. As such it resists any attempts to tamper with accumulated privileges and power.

There are several salient features of South African society worth noting. The democratic transition has opened a qualitatively new terrain of struggle. South Africa's democratic constitution is unique for a developing country. It embraces a far-reaching concept of democracy including by entrenching socio-economic rights, which also entails workers rights.

Formally therefore, South Africa is a democratic society with institutions that guarantee popular participation in policy formulation. Access to power is mediated by the unequal ownership of wealth in South Africa. Despite these gains guaranteeing popular participation, there are also attempts to limit popular participation, especially on economic questions. Nonetheless South Africa has all the formal characteristics of a modern democracy.


One of the unique features of South African society is the institutionalisation of participation and the creation of institutions for social dialogue. This has not matured into what critiques call a social contract. Social dialogue offers leverage to the labour movement to influence policy.

Democratisation provides the democratic movement and the working class with instruments to steer the transformation process in a radical direction. White capital on the other hand uses its accumulated wealth and power to undermine a radical democratisation process. This is essentially how the class struggle manifests itself in contemporary South African society.

In its first 8 years in power the democratic government has improved the lot of many ordinary black South Africans who lacked water, sanitation, electricity, education, health care, and the basic means of communication. These improvements have transformed many communities especially in the rural areas. The social deficit overshadows the remarkable achievements of the democratic state.

The trade union movement is one of the most active formations in post apartheid South Africa. COSATU did not see 1994 as the end of the struggle but the beginning of a phase to deepen and consolidate the democratic breakthrough. COSATU had to adapt to different terrains to advance its positions. These include processes, particularly those of the revolutionary alliance (that was created between ANC, SACP and COSATU to launch a common struggle against apartheid and for transformation of our society), as well as mass mobilization.

In the post 1994 political landscape, COSATU has advanced its policy perspectives through numerous forms, and has adopted a combination of methods of advocacy and mass struggle. This engagement has happened through a range of institutions and processes, including:


This all-round engagement strategy is effective and does produce results. The working class cannot afford to place all its eggs in one basket. What has not been won in the streets cannot be won in the boardroom.

The area of fiercest contestation in post apartheid South Africa was the adoption of conservative economic strategy by government in 1996. The Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) economic strategy. GEAR was heralded by a combination of factors - the belief that globalisation leaves us with no alternative, pressure from capital, and the belief that the apartheid debt left the democratic movement with no choice but to adopt conservative economic strategy. The devaluation of the currency in 1996 added further impetus to the demands for a conservative macroeconomic strategy.

The labour movement has been at the forefront of the struggle to critique the economic strategy and argued for and offered alternatives. It has mounted struggles around privatisation, job losses, better pay and improved working conditions and better labour laws.

As predicted, the strategy has failed to achieve its basic aims of growth, employment and redistribution. The only targets it has achieved as been the reduction of the government deficit - at the cost of reducing the government role in the economy and thus the stimulus that was required to kick-start the economy; and has reduced inflation.

Of course it is a debatable matter whether the strategy succeeded to stabilise the economy, as it is still prone to cyclical swings and external shocks. The fact that the strategy was not accompanied by an active industrial strategy has seen jobs disappearing as South African firms find it hard to adjust to stiff competition from foreign goods.

The conservative economic strategy limited the advances on social delivery due to real cuts in social expenditure. For the first time the budget has grown in real terms due to increase in military expenditure in 2001-2002 and slight relaxation of deficit targets and increased revenue in 2002-2003 fiscal years. All sectors of the economy particularly mining and manufacturing have been shedding jobs at a rapid rate

The above analysis demonstrates that the South African struggle is increasingly becoming a class struggle between the owners of the means of production and the working class. These classes are waging a struggle to win the soul of the democratic state. The state remains largely a progressive but not homogenous entity. In its social programmes it advances policies that are broadly in line with the vision of the democratic forces but is largely conservative in its economic vision.

The struggles waged by the South African working class are beginning to pay off. For the first time in eight years government has acknowledged the need for a national consensus on the economy. Currently all of us are working towards a National Growth Summit. Of course the government remains committed to the basic thrust of its economic strategy. COSATU is looking forward to the Growth and Development Summit as providing a fresh opportunity to develop an alternative economic strategy for South Africa. Such as strategy would center on the need to create quality jobs and decent work and must entail among others:

Let me conclude by saying the struggle continues - power concedes nothing without struggle.

Thank you again for inviting me to share the experiences of the SA working class with you.



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